Downloads

I was sitting at work today contemplating that I haven't really done anything that shows that I have the knowledge that I say I have, so I looked at getting certified in different things such as Java and Oracle. As I don't have the money to spend on lots of training courses, I did a quick google search into self-learning. I only looked at Oracle because Java self-learning resources are plentiful.

To self-learn Java you start at the Sun website, continue through websites such as Java Ranch, stumble across the Bruce Eckel books and then go through sites such as the Apache software Foundation to download and get the information you want. There are also the forums at the Sun website, Java Ranch and assorted mailing list archives for Apache Group software that you can use to post questions. If you do google searches you can get access to mailing list archives however a good mailing list archive for a lot of various technologies is hosted at MARC .

To find out about self-teaching Oracle is a bit harder as you get discover lots of information on training courses that you can go on which you must pay for. However I came across one or two articles, which were mostly out of date, giving information on what steps you could take to obtain evaluation/developers copies of Oracle and cheap training material from. One good article is So You Want to Become an Oracle DBA?

Anyway I downloaded my Oracle database and then decided that I would get an up uptodate copy of the JDK. Apparently I'm out of luck because I keep getting a fatal exception when I click on the download link on my firefox browser. I have however copied the link into IE and then pasted it back into firefox. This makes no sense I know but it works.